The mission was a disaster, the intelligence had been bad and the security compromised. I was looking down there barrels of 20 or more weapons, mostly AK-47's, and every one with a finger on the trigger waiting for some excuse. Not a good feeling to say the least, but I kept my composure and assumed a non menacing posture with no moves that were not called for by the men with guns. I had been on a hundred such forays deep into enemy territory, many that were a lot more intricate than this simple poop and scoot job should have been.
I went over it again in my head as they tie wrapped my hands and put a hood over my head. Get into the low level officers office, download his hard drive onto a thumb drive, and leave without a trace. Why did such a low level officer have such tight security around him, and how were they tipped off that we were coming? These questions would have to wait, from the few words that I could understand of their cursed gibberish sounding language I was heading straight for the interrogation room.
When the hood came off I found myself being pressed up onto a surgical table with a sharp pointed bayonet digging into left nipple. They had cut every stitch of clothing off of me with the exception of the hood before entering this space. The table was cold, but not nearly as cold as the eyes at the other end of that steel blade. After I was strapped in I was fitted with a medical retractor for my eyelids, this was getting serious. I had been trained extensively for the event of getting caught and eventual interrogation by some civil authority, but my instructors had never prepared me for a situation like this one. This was different and they were heading straight for those unusual means of extracting information that I had only been warned were possibilities.
Alone for hours with my eyes held wide open in front of a bright light and some god awful recorded noise playing on a loudspeaker I lay there freezing, in pain, and waiting for the real misery to commence. The noise that sounded like a cross between fingernails on a chalk board and the breaks of a train being engaged on a high speed rail car finally went silent. This was it, now would come the professional interrogator who was bound to know both the ways of inflicting the most intense pain imaginable, and the was to keep a person alive and talking while doing so.
The normal lights came on in the room and the surgical light above me was extinguished, I could see movement in front of me but I was too blind to see any details. Drops were put into my eyes and the retrator was removed. As my eyelids fluttered and I started to feel a little relief the shadow in front of me began to speak, it was the first of what were sure to be many questions. So lieutenant Lawless, what were you doing sneaking around this facility last night? "It's what I do at 2:30 in the morning when I can't sleep" was my reply. Just then the lights went out...
Image by Giphy.com
Prompt: It's what I do at 2:30 in the morning when I can't sleep
Set your timer for 5 minutes.
Start writing
Use the hashtag #freewrite
Publish your piece (include a link to this post if you wish)
Copy and paste your URL into the comment section of the prompt post.
Or, if you don't want to publish your freewrite, just copy and paste as a comment under the prompt post.
If you don't know what a freewrite is, her is a link to the introduction post